My point of starting was a Basin. Goods, bales, boxes, casks and cases … As we entered the large gas-lighted, roof-covered yard, amongst a group of Warwickshire, Staffordshire, and Lancashire bargemen, dressed in their short fustian trousers, heavy boots, red lush waistcoats with pearl buttons and fustian sleeves, and gay silk handkerchiefs slung loosely round their necks … We threaded our way between waggons, horses, cranes, bales, and men, until we stood before the black pool of water that ran up from the basin under the company’s buildings. Here … was the long thin form of the fly-boat Stourport … in which it had been arranged we should make our journey on the canal as far as Birmingham, or even beyond that town if we felt so disposed …
The Stourport may be taken as a fair specimen of the fly-boats which are now employed in the carrying trade upon the canals that intersect England in every direction, joining each other, and covering a length of nearly two thousand five hundred miles. For the conveyance of heavy goods that do not require a rapid transit, these boats still maintain, and are always likely to maintain their position, unaffected by railway competition; and it has been demonstrated that with the application of equal forces, canal carriage will move at the rate of two and a half miles an hour – (the average speed of fly boats) – a weight nearly four times as great as a railway carriage, and more than three times as great as turnpike carriage …
About one o’clock in the morning we reached the Islington tunnel … A couple of strong, thick boards … are hooked on to places formed on each side of the barge, near the head, from which they project like two raised oars. On these two narrow, insecure platforms, the two venturesome boatmen lie on their backs, holding on by grasping the board underneath, and with their legs up to their waist hanging over the water. A lantern, placed at the head of the barge, serves to lighten the operation which consists in moving the Stourport through the black tunnel by a measured side-step against the slimy, glistening walls; the right foot is planted in a half-slanting direction, and the left foot is constantly brought over with a sweep to take the vacated place, until the right can recover its footing. The Stourport, steered by its commander, Captain Randle, walks through the tunnel in the dead of night by the aid of its four stout legs and its four heavily hob-nailed boots that make a full echoing sound upon the walls like the measured clapping of hands but disturb not the sleeping inmates of houses and kitchens under which they pass; many of whom, perhaps, are ignorant of the black and barge-loaded Styx that flows beneath them.
We emerge from the tunnel at last, and tackle to our horse. Our progress is then slow and steady between the silent houses of Camden Town; past the anything but silent railway carrying establishment of the Messrs Pickford; round the outskirts of Regent’s Park; under the overhanging trees of the Zoological Gardens; and through Saint John’s Wood, to the termination of the Regent’s Canal, and the commencement of the Grand Junction Canal, near the Harrow Road, at Paddington.
John Hollingshead, Household Words, 1858, in Strike the Bell, edited by Roy Palmer